According to Yushchenko, a column of Russian troops advancing into the city stopped and opened fire on its way to the center of Bukha on February 27, killing two pedestrians. This column included Chechen fighters known as Kadyrovtsy, members of various military groups loyal to the local Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, known as “Putin’s soldier.” Yushchenko said he was able to identify them by their black clothing, the use of Islamic slogans and Kadyrov’s name on their armor. About an hour later, their column was decimated by the Ukrainian army in a different part of the city — but the Kadyrovtsy returned. “Many Chechen soldiers have taken to the streets to kill Ukrainian civilians,” Yuschenko told the Daily Beast. He described how Chechen fighters, also dressed in black, shot at a car on the road with at least “thirty bullets”, according to Yushchenko, killing the occupants and forcing them to stop on the side of the road next to the apartment building where he was staying. Kadyrovtsy then allegedly dragged the two dead men who had been shot outside the car, left them on the side of the road and left in the car themselves. Yuschenko’s mother Zina Yehorovna, Pavel Kondratyev’s friend and Bogdan’s neighbor confirmed the incident to The Daily Beast. According to Bogdan, however, the Chechens then hit a citizen who was trying to escape from the scene by car, leaving him hanging from the hood of the car before slipping on the road. “They were just shot.” “It is just a war crime what they have done here,” said Yushchenko, standing next to the bench on which the car fell after being allegedly attacked by Kadyrovtsy. “This is not a war.” Artem Khurin, a member of the city council of the neighboring city of Irpin, who also serves as deputy commander of the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine, was one of the first people to visit Bucha after the Russian withdrawal. There, he heard numerous testimonies from residents about life in areas such as Yablonska Street, where a group of Kadyrovtsy were to move to Kyiv. According to Hurin, Ukrainian civilians were not the only people allegedly brutally beaten in the city by the Kadyrovtsy. Hurin said residents he spoke to in Borodyanka, northwest of Bhutan, told what the Kadyrovtsis had done to the wounded Russian soldiers they had brought there from Bhutan. “They would bring seriously injured Russian soldiers to a large hospital they had there and those who were very seriously would be shot,” he told the Daily Beast. “And no one but Kadyrovtsy did that.” The locals mourn as a mass grave is exhumed. Local authorities tried to identify the bodies of civilians who lost their lives during the Russian occupation of Bucha in Ukraine.

Photo by Wolfgang Schwan / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Eyewitnesses claimed that Kadyrovtsy had executed people as early as March 5, and Bucha Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk said that Chechen units had tied white ribbons around the detainees’ hands that were similar to those found on the bodies of executed civilians. Hurin said he saw evidence of executions and torture on corpses he found on the street and spoke to a woman who endured four days of torture at the hands of a Kadyrovtsy fighter and a Belarusian soldier before shooting her husband in the head. “They were not allowed to do anything. “They just killed people with binoculars, for example,” Hurin said, describing what happened to people who tried to leave their homes for food and water. “They were just shot.” He also confirmed previous reports of a local base at a glass factory on Yablonska Street, which Ukraine’s ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova said served as a torture chamber operated by Russians and Chechens. According to the Kyiv Region police, the bodies of about 1,150 civilians have been found throughout the Kiev region since Russian forces withdrew in late March and early April. In Bucha alone, more than 400 people have been found dead so far, most of whom were killed by Russian occupiers of the city during the weeks leading up to their departure from the city on April 1. However, narratives such as Yushchenko’s provide evidence that indiscriminate violence against civilians was part of the Russian army’s book on Bukha almost from the beginning of the war itself, with Chechen Kadyrovtsi playing a key role in its atrocities even from an early age. area and their own. fellow soldiers. Much remains unknown about Chechnya’s activity in Bucha, but new details and testimonies from residents and local authorities make it possible to get a clearer picture of the Chechen forces’ violent presence in the city and their involvement in the weeks-long war crimes. . The residents. Social media evidence, residents’ testimonies and material confiscated by the Kyiv Region police suggest that Kadyrovtsy regiments in Bucha probably belonged to the Special Rapid Reaction Unit (SOBR) and the (OMON) together with other Russian troops, they were probably responsible for a significant part of the massacre that took place there. According to independent security analyst Harold Chambers, who specializes in the North Caucasus, this kind of personal violence by Kadyrovtsy in Bucha is not surprising. “What they have experience with, in terms of military operations, is really these zachistki, these pure scan operations,” Chambers said, referring to a brutal style of house-to-house search and killings perfected by Russian forces during of the Chechen Wars. in the 1990s and early 2000s. “It plays into their specialty of targeting civilians, and from the stories we have already heard from Buha, this was largely the case.” Despite their presence in Butsa in late February, Russian forces were unable to gain full control of the city until several days later, on March 2 or later. groups responsible for the massacre that followed in Bouha throughout March, but evidence shows that they were not the only ones involved. According to Andriy Halavin, a priest at St. Andrew the Apostle Church in Bucha, where a mass grave of about 280 people was dug during the Russian occupation, regiments containing SOBR and OMON units began to replace the original forces. occupation later in March. “In the beginning, although they were, say, strict, they were fair. “At first they just looked for my car and told me to keep working and so on,” Halavin said. “But then came the others.” Andriy Nebytov, the head of the Bucha district police in charge of Bucha, confirmed that SOBR and OMON units were present in the Kiev area, citing documents seized by his police department and showing lists of members of the constituencies that had arrived in the area. . . Because the information will be used in future criminal cases against Russia, his office could not provide the list to The Daily Beast, but the documents appear in a video recently posted by Nebytov. On February 27, Ukrainian forces destroyed a large convoy of vehicles including Kadyrovtsy on Vokzal’na Street near Bucha Railway Station, which Yuschenko’s account owed on the same day. The column had reached the town from Hostomel, just northeast of Bucha, where Hussein Mezhidov, the Chechen commander of the “Yug” battalion of Kadyrovtsy’s 141st Special Motor Regiment, was seen in a video on 26 February. “This situation was the biggest horror of my life.” According to Chambers, the most likely Chechen unit present in Bucha on February 27 was the SOBR “Akhmat” team. However, Chambers noted that the plan to organize Kadyrovtsy units around Kyiv makes it particularly difficult to locate specific battle groups that had fought on this front. “Kadyrovtsky do not seem to fight so much in limited units, they seem to work more in combined teams,” Chambers said. “You have a lot of overlapping commanders, so it seems less clear how the units were separated.” Militaryly and strategically, the Kadyrovtsy deployed in the Kiev region served a variety of purposes – some groups were designed to be strike groups intended to assassinate Ukrainian President Zelensky and his family if they could reach Kyiv, but according to Michael Kofman, director of the Russian Studies Program at the CNA, said the primary purpose of these units was a broader one. “The Chechens have a real purpose. “The Russian military needs manpower,” Coffman said. He added that the Kadyrovtsy were to be deployed in the cities, especially in Kyiv, to support troops from the Eastern Military District, who were supposed to hold the siege of the capital, and to fight alongside airborne units within the city limits. “These Chechen units and these auxiliaries were therefore very important for the civil struggle, because many of the other units they would send had a rather low manpower availability,” he said. A Ukrainian soldier watches as workers exhume bodies from a mass grave in Bucha, northwest of Kiev. Ukraine says it has found 1,222 bodies in Bukha and other cities.

AFP via Getty Images

Eventually, none of this happened and the Kadyrovtsy, along with other Russian units, were left to …